Where the twelve animals come from

Rat and ox, tiger and rabbit, dragon and snake, then horse, goat, monkey, rooster, dog and pig: anyone who has ever heard of Chinese astrology knows these twelve names. They are also the youngest thing in the whole system — labels on a counting series that managed without them for a very long time. Anyone who knows that reads the animal descriptions in a different light.

First the counting series, then the animals

The counting is done with twelve earthly branches. These are characters with no pictorial content which, together with ten heavenly stems, number the days, the months and the years — a kind of calendar alphabet. The count is old: on the oracle bones of the Shang period, a good thousand years BC, it is already used to number the days. Rats and dragons are nowhere mentioned there.

The animals were added later. Complete and in today's order, they appear in texts of the Han period, that is in the first century AD; older manuscripts on bamboo strips do assign animals to the branches, but they differ in several places. The legend of the race at the river, which every child in East Asia knows, tells how the animals are supposed to have come by their places. Where the twelve places themselves come from, the ones handed out in the story, it does not say.

That has a practical consequence. The calculation runs on the branches and their phases, not on the animals. An animal is the name of a position, just as “Aries” in the West is the name for thirty degrees of the zodiac — and no astrologer infers anything from the fleece of a ram.

Not the same twelve everywhere

The cycle travelled with the calendar to Vietnam, to Korea, to Japan and further still, and it swapped animals on the way. The branches stayed unchanged — their names did not.

• In Vietnam the fourth place goes to the cat, where the rabbit runs in China. The second sign there is the water buffalo, the working animal of the rice fields.
• In Japan the twelfth sign is read as a wild boar and not as a domestic pig.
• The eighth sign is called yang in Chinese — a word that covers goat and sheep alike. German accounts usually make it the goat, Japanese ones the sheep. Both are correctly translated.

That the animals travel while the count does not shows once again which of the two layers is the load-bearing one.

Where you meet the year animal in everyday life

In East Asia the animal sign is not a niche subject, the way the horoscope column is in the West, but a piece of everyday language.

• At the New Year festival the animal of the coming year is everywhere: on jewellery, on pastries and on greetings. Since 1980 the Chinese post office has issued a zodiac stamp for every year.
• Asking after the animal sign is a polite way of asking what year someone was born in. Anyone who hears the animal and can judge the age roughly knows the year of birth.
• One's own animal year, which comes round every twelve years, is considered a delicate one. Red is worn during it — a belt, socks — traditionally a present from older relatives.
• In Dragon years the number of births rises measurably in several East Asian countries. The sign counts as the most favourable one, and enough parents go by it for it to show in the statistics.

What that means for the animal portraits

The descriptions one reads everywhere — the rat resourceful, the dog loyal, the pig good-natured — are drawn from the image of the animal and not from the calendar. That makes them the most easily translated part of the system and at the same time the least binding one: they can be carried into any language without a single calculation coming with them.

There is nothing to be said against that, as long as it stays clear what is being read — a layer for remembering, not an analysis. What lies beneath the names, and how a birth chart is made out of it, is set out under Chinese astrology.